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Assumptions That Are Likely False

• curriculum comprises well-defined information and skills that represent necessary human knowledge  • the purpose of schools is to ensure students get the information and skills into their brains, thus become educated • educators know how to deliver instruction so the curriculum is transferred into students’ brains • the most efficient instruction occurs from simple Read More

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Are They Learning? How Do We Know?

I posted a tweet recently that seemed to motivate folks to engage. I posted: What if students learn, but can't perform on assessments? — Dr. Gary Ackerman (@GaryAckermanPhD) November 23, 2023 The responses to my tweet suggest there are some educators have not yet abandoned the platform, and those who remain are thoughtful about the Read More

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On Learning to Teach

The one thing that has not changed during my 35 years in education is that teachers complain about anything they perceive as “not practical.” When I was an undergraduate student, by classmates and I sat in the corridors of the building s in which education classes met (usually drinking coffee– a truly useful skill for Read More

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Education Cannot Be Engineered

The most flawed educational proposals proceed from the position that education is an engineering problem, and thus we can build educational systems can be built to create systems that produce measurable achievement reliably. For many reasons, those systems that approach all teaching and learning as a recipe that produces learning that can be measured with Read More

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What? Why? And How?

Throughout my career as an educational technologist, I frequently used a “What? Why? And How?” structure to organize my presentations to students and to faculty. The earliest evidence I can find in my teaching of this organization is in 2000 when teaching the information technology course in the school librarian sequence at our state university. Read More